Ubuntu 9.04 & Catalyst 9.7 (fglrx)

[fermulator]

Running Ubunty 9.04 Jaunty.

I've been a long supporter of ATI, for over 10 years now in fact. Been hoping for a while now for the ATI+Linux scene to get better. I was happy for the past 6 months since the open source radeon driver became very stable with good 3D support for legacy cards. I had a Radeon X1950 Pro, dual monitors, and compiz effects enabled. I still couldn't play most games in linux, but rebooting into windows for this was temporarily acceptable for me.

Well. After, unfortunately, waiting for 2 years now for the open source Radeon drivers to support OpenGL2, I decided to be a nice ATI customer and purchase a new card. I've purchased a shiny new ATI Radeon HD 4870 (RV770).

Since the purpose of this purchase was to achieve "official linux support" from ATI again, I went straight to the Catalyst 9.7 drivers for fglrx. I followed the instructions at http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubuntu_Jaunty_Installation_Guide. The amdcccle didn't recognize that I had two monitors. It was either "clone", or some terrible form of Big Desktop (left monitor 1680x1050, right monitor 640x480). Any sort of tweaking to try for proper "Big Desktop" support often resulted in X crashing. Sad face; -- so much for an upgrade...

For now, I'm using tormodvolden's edge radeonhd drivers (http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubuntu_Jaunty_Installation_Guide#Installing_Open_S ource_Edge_Drivers). At least they're stable, and support dual monitor "big desktop" mode. Unfortunately, I've lost support for 2D acceleration (compiz).

Can anyone please suggest how I can get my brand new ATI card working with Linux using the proprietary drivers?

In summary, I'm expecting the following to work:
* fglrx proprietary driver -- stable
* dual monitors (big desktop) mode (1680x1050 & 1680x1050)
* 2D & 3D hardware acceleration
* OpenGLx support for playing the latest native Linux 3D games, and at least the ability to "TRY" to play games in WINE (wine is beyond the scope of things here though, I realize this).

My Hardware & Software versions:
* 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV770 [Radeon HD 4870]
* Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty (2.6.28-14-server)
* xserver-xorg 1:7.4~5ubuntu18 the X.Org X server


Thanks so much!

[bridgman]

Since the purpose of this purchase was to achieve "official linux support" from ATI again, I went straight to the Catalyst 9.7 drivers for fglrx. I followed the instructions at http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubuntu_Jaunty_Installation_Guide. The amdcccle didn't recognize that I had two monitors. It was either "clone", or some terrible form of Big Desktop (left monitor 1680x1050, right monitor 640x480). Any sort of tweaking to try for proper "Big Desktop" support often resulted in X crashing. Sad face; -- so much for an upgrade...!

I don't really understand the instructions at that link; I'll try to rationalize them with our install instructions over the weekend but for now you would probably have more success following the instructions that come with the driver package and only referencing other install instructions if you have questions or problems. I imagine all of the instructions on the net were correct at one point, but the installer package has changed significantly over the last couple of years.

You should not need to edit the xorg.conf file. Most of the driver behaviour is controlled by a separate file - amdpcsdb. Both amdpcsdb and xorg.conf are set up by the aticonfig --initial command, with parameters for dual-head, multi-GPU etc...

Did you run "sudo aticonfig --initial=dual-head" after installing the Catalyst driver ? I didn't see that mentioned in the link you posted. If you did not run with the dual-head option, give that a try as a first step. Your symptoms sound as if the driver was initialized as single head rather than dual head. If you have manually edited your xorg.conf file you might want to include the -f option, which allows aticonfig to significantly change portions of the xorg.conf file if necessary.

Let us know whether you want to go with the open source or Catalyst drivers as a first step. If you want to get acceleration working on the open source drivers first, please pastebin your xorg log and dmesg output. If you want to go with the Catalyst drivers, we can go that way as well, but please try the instructions we provide with the driver package. You can either install "natively" or by building packages; recommend that you build packages for Ubunutu then install those packages.

Regarding the open source drivers, Jaunty includes kernel and xf86-video-ati (radeon) support for EXA and Xv acceleration out of the box without needing to install radeonhd. If you don't have 2D acceleration with radeonhd, there are probably leftover bits of the Catalyst driver interfering with the open source kernel driver.

[fermulator]

Did you run "sudo aticonfig --initial=dual-head" after installing the Catalyst driver ? I didn't see that mentioned in the link you posted. If you did not run with the dual-head option, give that a try as a first step. Your symptoms sound as if the driver was initialized as single head rather than dual head.

Let us know whether you want to go with the open source or Catalyst drivers as a first step. If you want to get acceleration working on the open source drivers first, please pastebin your xorg log and dmesg output. If you want to go with the Catalyst drivers, we can go that way as well, but please try the instructions we provide with the driver package. You can either install "natively" or by building packages; recommend that you build packages for Ubunutu then install those packages.

What do you recommend Bridgman? Based on my "desired results" from the original post, can I achieve all of those things with either solution?

As I mentioned, I was previously very happy with the open source drivers for the legacy cards (less the lack of OGL2 support), so this is why I purchased a new card. I would really like to have OpenGL support again for my graphics card. My guess is that this means I want to stick with the proprietary driver (for now) until the open source driver (and all that new crazy infrastructure) stabilizes, yes?

RE the instructions on that wiki website, I've found that they always worked for me with the Ubuntu distro, but I haven't tried the ATI instructions for some time. Those instructions do have us generate deb packages from the ati installer. However, the "dual-head" parameter is not mentioned. I will try this! Thanks

[fermulator]

OK so I re-installed the proprietary drivers using --initial=dual-head.

Here's more details on how I did this (used slightly modified instructions from that above website)

1. Ensured I had all the necessary packages:
sudo apt-get install build-essential cdbs fakeroot dh-make debhelper debconf libstdc++5 dkms
1. Downloaded download ati-driver-installer-9-7-x86.x86_64.run to /usr/local/src/ati/9.7.
2. Built the distro specific packages (deb) for Ubuntu:
sh ati-driver-installer-9-7-x86.x86_64.run --buildpkg Ubuntu/jaunty
3. Now I had all the debs ready for install. I don't care about the dev package though:
sudo mkdir dev
sudo mv xorg-driver-fglrx-dev_*.deb dev
4. Now install the remaining debs
sudo dpkg -i *.deb
5. This was successful, yay!
6. My previous xorg.conf was for the open source radeon drivers, so I modified it to the basic possible configuration:
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Configured Screen Device"
Device "Configured Video Device"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
Driver "fglrx"
EndSection

Section "ServerFlags"
Option "DontZap" "False"
EndSection
7. Then I ran:
sudo aticonfig --initial=dual-head -f
8. Reboot.

The system rebooted without crash. When I logged in however, the "dual head" configuration wasn't really right. It seemed like it had two separate X sessions, one for monitor. compiz desktop effects however DID work. When I moved the mouse across, it would behave strangely and jump around. This isn't what I wanted, I want "big desktop" mode, where you can drag windows between the two monitors.

1. Fire up AMD Catalyst Control Center:
gksu amdcccle

http://img29.imageshack.us/img29/9814/amdccclemissingbigdeskt.png

Again, I'll reiterate. Under the "Display Manager", in the "Multi-Display" tab, "Display Configuration". I'm expecting to see an option in the drop down box called "Big Desktop", but it's not there. The only options for "Multi-Display" are "Single (Independent Display)" and "Unknown". :-(

2. Under "Display Options" I tried Xinerama, but it's really buggered. After a reboot, i can *almost* drag windows across, but they don't quite use the enter "secondary" screen... it's buggered. Since enabling xinerama, compiz no longer works.

This is the xorg.conf that aticonfig generated for me: http://pastebin.com/f7f6f5981

[fermulator]

"bump"? :-0

[adamk]

Run this command to change your xorg configuration so that xrandr is disabled:

aticonfig --set-pcs-str="DDX,EnableRandR12,FALSE"

Then restart X and you should see "Big Desktop" as an option.

AMD should make that the default till they fix their buggy xrandr implementation.

Adam

[fermulator]

Run this command to change your xorg configuration so that xrandr is disabled:

aticonfig --set-pcs-str="DDX,EnableRandR12,FALSE"

Then restart X and you should see "Big Desktop" as an option.

AMD should make that the default till they fix their buggy xrandr implementation.

Adam

Thanks Adam, this allowed me to choose Big Desktop!

[mslinn]

I *really* tried before posting here. My goal is to have a dual monitor system, with one screen in landscape orientation and one screen in portrait orientation. This (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=7906854#post7906854) is what I have tried so far. Would someone please answer the questions I raised in that post, and give me some direction? Apologies for the length of the posting I reference, but I felt it important to show the history in case my actions caused mischievous cruft to be scattered about.

Thanks,

Mike

[mslinn]

Can anyone help?

Thanks,

Mike

[fermulator]

Can anyone help?

Thanks,

Mike

Try the latest catalyst drivers, they work better with defaults.

[BillTheGeologist]

Run this command to change your xorg configuration so that xrandr is disabled:

aticonfig --set-pcs-str="DDX,EnableRandR12,FALSE"

Then restart X and you should see "Big Desktop" as an option.

AMD should make that the default till they fix their buggy xrandr implementation.

Adam

Adam,
I managed to get the "Big Desktop" option to appear and remain an option in Catalyst, but every time I logout or reboot the system, the "clone 1" option is replacing my settings which work perfectly while logged in. I ran amdcccle as super-user and my user account and still have the same result. The Gnome login window after reboot/logout recognizes the new settings (login is on left screen, right screen black).

I am running Ubuntu Jaunty 64-bit system, using a ATI Radeon HD 3600, installed driver version 8.65, catalyst 9.9.

[adamk]

Sorry, I can't really help with this. I haven't used fglrx in quite a while, and found that command on the internet.

Adam

[fermulator]

Adam,
I managed to get the "Big Desktop" option to appear and remain an option in Catalyst, but every time I logout or reboot the system, the "clone 1" option is replacing my settings which work perfectly while logged in. I ran amdcccle as super-user and my user account and still have the same result. The Gnome login window after reboot/logout recognizes the new settings (login is on left screen, right screen black).

I am running Ubuntu Jaunty 64-bit system, using a ATI Radeon HD 3600, installed driver version 8.65, catalyst 9.9.

When I used to have problems with settings not sticking, I fiddled with the amd config file:
fermulator@fermmy:/etc/ati$ ls -al /etc/ati/amd*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 27568 2009-10-01 11:01 /etc/ati/amdpcsdb
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1635 2009-09-26 21:35 /etc/ati/amdpcsdb.default

1. Boot system in single user mode (don't let X load)
2. make a backup of your amdpcsdb
sudo mv /etc/ati/amdpcsdb /etc/ati/amdpcsdb.bak
3. copy the default
sudo cp /etc/ati/amdpcsdb.default /etc/ati/amdpcsdb
4. Apply necessary changes again ...
5. Restart the system

Hopefully this helps you in so me way. Perhaps someone from ATI can comment and confirm the process for "settings not sticking". For me at least, this is what I did to make things work again.

[BillTheGeologist]

When I used to have problems with settings not sticking, I fiddled with the amd config file:
fermulator@fermmy:/etc/ati$ ls -al /etc/ati/amd*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 27568 2009-10-01 11:01 /etc/ati/amdpcsdb
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1635 2009-09-26 21:35 /etc/ati/amdpcsdb.default

1. Boot system in single user mode (don't let X load)
2. make a backup of your amdpcsdb
sudo mv /etc/ati/amdpcsdb /etc/ati/amdpcsdb.bak
3. copy the default
sudo cp /etc/ati/amdpcsdb.default /etc/ati/amdpcsdb
4. Apply necessary changes again ...
5. Restart the system

Hopefully this helps you in so me way. Perhaps someone from ATI can comment and confirm the process for "settings not sticking". For me at least, this is what I did to make things work again.



Fermulator,
You're awesome. That took care of the settings issue. I need to figure out now how to get the resolution and refresh rates for each monitor back to the correct settings. This was fine before, except for the whole settings loss on logout/reboot thing.

I had the resolution set for 2560x1024 and refresh was 75Hz. Can you post the appropriate syntax to get this set/available. The highest setting in "gksu amdcccle" is 2048x768, but the requested res and refresh was available previously (before the fix).

[fermulator]

Fermulator,
You're awesome. That took care of the settings issue. I need to figure out now how to get the resolution and refresh rates for each monitor back to the correct settings. This was fine before, except for the whole settings loss on logout/reboot thing.

I had the resolution set for 2560x1024 and refresh was 75Hz. Can you post the appropriate syntax to get this set/available. The highest setting in "gksu amdcccle" is 2048x768, but the requested res and refresh was available previously (before the fix).

Glad it worked for you!

What distro are you running? -- I'm running Ubuntu 9.04 currently, and following these instructions is how I get the AMD Catalyst drivers to install nicely integrating with Ubuntu's "Deb" package manager and etc.:
http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubuntu_Jaunty_Installation_Guide#Installing_the_dr ivers_manually

My guess is that you need to re-run the ati config command:
sudo aticonfig --initial -f

The other thing to consider is to check your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and ensure that the "Virtual" resolution is as large as needed... (honestly though, I'm not sure you should have to edit this manually as when I ran amdcccle it automatically adjusted this for me, and even told me it was going to do this...)

Here's my screen section in my own xorg.conf:
Section "Screen"
Identifier "aticonfig-Screen[0]-0"
Device "aticonfig-Device[0]-0"
Monitor "aticonfig-Monitor[0]-0"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Virtual 3360 3360
Depth 24
EndSubSection
EndSection
NOTE: I have dual monitors, each monitor running @ 1680x1050, so the total virtual space configuration allows me to have my screens side-by-side or top-to-bottom (rotated) -- basically the worst case -- allows me to configure my dual monitors in any way I like.

[BillTheGeologist]

Glad it worked for you!

What distro are you running? -- I'm running Ubuntu 9.04 currently, and following these instructions is how I get the AMD Catalyst drivers to install nicely integrating with Ubuntu's "Deb" package manager and etc.:
http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubuntu_Jaunty_Installation_Guide#Installing_the_dr ivers_manually

My guess is that you need to re-run the ati config command:
sudo aticonfig --initial -f

The other thing to consider is to check your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and ensure that the "Virtual" resolution is as large as needed... (honestly though, I'm not sure you should have to edit this manually as when I ran amdcccle it automatically adjusted this for me, and even told me it was going to do this...)


Here's my screen section in my own xorg.conf:

NOTE: I have dual monitors, each monitor running @ 1680x1050, so the total virtual space configuration allows me to have my screens side-by-side or top-to-bottom (rotated) -- basically the worst case -- allows me to configure my dual monitors in any way I like.


I am running 9.04, too, 64-bit. I tried your suggestions with no luck. For some reason, the resolution and refresh do not change even after replacing the amdpcsdb file and applying the changes. Xrandr is still an available command option and it shows the max resolution being the 2048x768 at 60 Hz.

Is there a way to tell X whether through Xrandr or somewhere in the amd/ati config files that these values are higher? The xorg.conf file doen't have an option for "Virtual", and when I insert, save, and reboot the wallpaper has changed, window switching/minimizing/maximizing/closing is slow by 1-2 seconds, and the settings in both Catalyst and Gnome Screen Resolution remain the same. I can't seem to get the code to work using Xrandr: I need to add the resolution and refresh rate to be available in Catalyst and the syntax is a little confusing. Only 2048x768 shown when Catalyst open, but numerous under the Gnome Screen Resolution option under System=>Preferences, none higher than 2048x768.

[mslinn]

I'm running Ubuntu 9.04. How should I do this?

Mike


Try the latest catalyst drivers, they work better with defaults.

[fermulator]

I'm running Ubuntu 9.04. How should I do this?

Mike

I always follow these instructions: http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubuntu_Jaunty_Installation_Guide#Installing_the_dr ivers_manually, modifying for whatever the latest version from ATI is at the time.

Installing the ATI drivers as DEBs is "nicer".

[mslinn]

Uh-oh. I have two EAH-4350 cards, which are not on the compatibility list. Is there a way forward?

[mslinn]

I just did a clean install with Ubuntu 9.10 and the Catalyst drivers. Still only uses one monitor even though there are two EAH4350 cards. I get "Failed to execute child process "amdxdg-su" (No such file or directory)."

Tried uninstalling and reinstalling several times. Am I wasting my time on this card? Should I be using other drivers?

I've been stuck here for months.

[bridgman]

mslinn; are you running the appropriate aticonfig command after install ? Going from memory, but I think it would be something like :

sudo aticonfig --initial=dual-head --adapter=all

If you run aticonfig --help and look at the end of the resulting output you'll find details on these options. Further up are options to let you control where the screens are placed.

You *might* also want to disable RandR support if you're using multiple cards -- not sure if that is still required or if we figured out how to make RandR (which is still single-card oriented) coexist with multicard support -- but make sure you're running the right setup commands first and let us know what happens.

[DeepDayze]

Hopefully xrandr will add multi-head and multi-card support so that it can fix things like that

[bridgman]

Yeah... the hard part is that the RandR model assumes all displays are in the same frame buffer, which simplifies the rest of the graphics stack.

Going to multi-card means that drawing commands all need to be checked against card boundaries and executed on one or both GPUs depending on whether the window (and the operation) cross the line between cards.